The “Sort Of” Passive Income Game for Coaches

It’s important that we start with – this isn’t a how-to for how to make a ton of cash building residual income! However, there are some trends that have emerged for online coaches, and we would be remiss not to mention them. Not only that but as the purpose of our service is to help coaches operate their businesses with less headaches – so we’ll touch on how we help you with each of these.

#1 – Sharing Your Knowledge with Webinars

Webinars are often used as marketing tools. You get a chance to share information in a video format and then you can pitch / market your products at the end. That’s one angle. However, if you are actually sharing training information – you can have paid webinars where you are charging people to basically attend your webinar. You’ll have to do the work to build your audience and establish yourself as a professional – but it can be very lucrative. The big plus here is that it takes the same time and effort to conduct a webinar for 10 people as it does for 1000, so you can make some serious earnings.

#2 – Educating Your Audience With Online Courses

This seems to be the holy grail for online courses. If your courses is completely asynchronous ( self paced ), you can spend the time to get your course developed and then have an unlimited number of people taking your course. Courses can include pdfs, workbooks, video, text, quizzes, certificates and more. They are a great way to share your expertise with a much larger audience without having to spend more time.

#3- Membership Programs – Exclusive Access to Your Content

When you set up a membership program, you are really selling private exclusive access to your content. This is a great approach for sharing expertise, tapping your audience for follow up sales and setting the foundation for pitching your VIP programs. These are very lucrative because membership programs are really subscription programs ( most of the time ). That way you are getting a monthly payment from your customers, and you are providing access to a private online group, space, or information. You may have the challenge of constantly adding new information – but it can mean earning a lot more for a lot less effort.

#4 – Digital Products for Sale on Your Website

In addition to selling coaching services, coaches have the ability to sell digital downloads. It’s a way to turn your content that you use in your coaching into a stand alone product. Digital downloads are great because you create them once, and you can sell them forever. You can sell anything from ebooks, templates, guides, workbooks, etc. In short as long as the information can be put into a document – you can sell it. You will want to make sure that you “secure” your downloads so people can’t access them without payment.

#5 – Affiliate Marketing

If you want to have people underneath you also driving sales – you can set up an affiliate program. The idea is pretty simple – they send you customers, and you you give your affiliate a piece of the sales – thereby reducing your overall effort to make sales and making more cash passively. Affiliate systems manage the entire process for you. They provide a way to track your affiliates, track the traffic they send, create the reports on performance, and helping to figure out how much to pay them and when.

There’s No Getting Around This!

If you’re saying – well all of this seems like a lot of work – and can’t I just raise my prices? – The answer is – absolutely you can. We won’t get into pricing strategy but always remember this. You have a finite amount of time. Therefore no matter what you charge by the hour – there’s a finite amount of money you can make that is tied to the time you spend. Therefore the only way to break through that glass ceiling – is to add passive income to your portfolio of services.

Now – we get it. We understand that these services are important. We provide tools to help our coaches manage their coaching activities. However, in addition, we understand just how critical these passive income methods are for coaches. So here’s how we help you :

For webinars – depending on how you are conducting your webinars, we can support the wordpress plugins designed to support those platforms. We also have an event plugin that can handle registration for specific events and collect payment. It will not directly connect to your webinar platform but you can import your confirmed RSVPs into invitations. Our team is ready to help you map out what this business flow would be like.

For online courses – we may not be the people to help you figure out what your course should be – we can help you put your online course directly on your website. That means no losing money to paying a subscription for hosting. No additional logins to manage your course. It means not losing web traffic because people have to come off your website to view your courses. Finally– while we don’t host videos directly – our team can help you figure out the best way to host video content and secure it.

For Membership Programs – it’s great to get people to pay a monthly amount to get access to your premium content ( for paid members only ). Because we understand how critical that functionality is for coaches, we provide several systems for managing a membership program. Thinking through a membership program can be a tricky thing – how to charge, trial access? How to restrict information … how to configure the site … how to build a community… etc. Our team helps our customers brainstorm and plan through all of those subtleties. Your membership program will be right on your website – no additional systems / services required.

For Digital Products – There are different ways to sell and serve digital products. We provide the ability to sell digital products directly on your website. This means no paying extra money to a service to host your digital sales. It also means your customers can stay on your website to get sales.

For Affiliates – setting up affiliate systems is no simple thing. We provide several platforms for running your own affiliate platform on your website. We’ll even share some tips and tricks for securing sensitive data, thinking through how to support your affiliates, and some considerations for how to structure your program.

Hopefully at this point you understand that CoachSites is so much more than just WordPress hosting. If you’re interested in eventually incorporating these passive income methods – we definitely want to chat with you. We might not know your business inside out – but we understand the mechanics of how to implement these methods. And our team is always ready to help.